Public Discourses and Attitudes in Greece during the Crisis

Framing the Role of the European Union, Germany and National Governments

Dimitris Katsikas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032475035
• eBook ISBN: 9781351743808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents the findings of new empirical research regarding shifts in public discourses and attitudes in Greek society as a result of the crisis.

These findings have shown different shades of Euroscepticism and anti-German sentiments, but they have also revealed a normative conflict within Greek society itself. The book shows how economic crises and strict policy conditionality, causing or deepening economic recession in the countries receiving it, has the potential to set in motion a fragmentation process, which transcends standard material stratification and relates to broader political and even cultural rifts among the population. With this, the book serves as a case study of the impact of wider pressures and shifts weighing upon the European Union (EU) and the way European societies perceive the integration process.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU politics, Greek and Southern European studies and more broadly to cultural and comparative politics and political economy and European politics.

1	The elusive consensus of a society in crisis
	Dimitris Katsikas

Impoverished and divided: aspects of material and ideational fragmentation

The crisis in Greece was the most dramatic and protracted episode of the broader Eurozone crisis. While other countries that had to resort to the funding mechanisms of the European Union (EU) exited their bailout programmes and staged an economic recovery, the crisis in Greece seemed to be without end.¹ One of its key characteristics, which could go some way towards explaining the difficulty of its resolution, is the very intense and polarized public discourse that has dominated the country’s social and political life during the years of the crisis. While neither intensity nor polarization is a new feature of the Greek public discourse (Lyrintzis 2011; Pappas 2014), in recent years, these features have reached unprecedented heights, revealing, among other things, a fragmentation of Greek society along the lines of different and often-conflicting narratives or ‘frames’ of understanding the crisis. This fragmentation made it impossible to reach the social and political consensus necessary for formulating a programme of policies and reforms capable of leading the country out of the crisis.

The dominant fragmentation line was the ‘Memorandum/anti-­Memorandum’ divide. From May 2010, when the first Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) detailing the policy programme accompanying the first bailout loan was signed, up to the summer of 2015, when the new coalition government of Syriza/Independent Greeks (ANEL) abandoned its failed attempt to re-negotiate the ‘MoUs framework’ and signed a third MoU, the ‘Memorandum/anti-Memorandum’ rift dominated public discourse in Greece.² It pitted those who opposed vehemently the MoUs and regarded them as the main cause of the crisis, against those who endorsed at least part of the policy programme of the MOUs or accepted it as necessary or inevitable and thought that the crisis brought the MoUs and not the other way around. The groups on the opposite sides of this divide were by no means uniform; indeed, despite their broadly similar attitude towards the MoUs, within each camp, significant differences existed in the accounts employed to make sense of what was happening and who was to blame for it.

There is no doubt that the economic impact of the crisis has acted as a catalyst for the development of this divide. The crisis amplified the material fragmentation of Greek society, as the years-long depression of the economy resulted in prolonged unemployment, poverty and social exclusion for large parts of the Greek population. In a country where political authority has always been exercised in a particularistic manner (Tsoucalas 1991) and interest representation has been characterized by extensive fragmentation (Lavdas 1997; Pagoulatos 2003; Featherstone and Papadimitriou 2008), the economic crisis deepened the old divisions between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Social policy was not able to address the deepening socio-economic fragmentation, as the funding constraints imposed by austerity weakened an already-inefficient and highly fragmented welfare system. As a result, the position of the system’s ‘outsiders’ (e.g. immigrants, the unemployed, people working with irregular employment contracts and workers in the shadow economy) deteriorated further compared to that of the system’s ‘insiders’ (Katsikas et al. 2018a). At the same time, the crisis created new divisions as new losers and winners emerged, altering the pre-existing economic and social stratification (Giannitsis and Zografakis 2016). Unsurprisingly, the abrupt change in material circumstances experienced by different individuals and groups led to different interpretations and blame attributions for their diverging fortunes and the new economic and social cleavages.

In addition to its material impact, the ‘Memorandum’ divided and polarized public opinion and discourse in Greece, because, in a single word, it effectively encompassed all the different strands of attitudes and discourses, not only on various aspects of public policy related to the conditionality of the bailout programmes but, most importantly, also on Greece. Given that this was a crisis of existential proportions for Greece, there is little doubt that individuals’ interpretations of it were influenced by their fundamental worldviews and understandings of Greece and its place in the world. These worldviews are a part of individuals’ ‘primary frameworks’, that is, their fundamental belief systems of reference, which operate as filters for the interpretation and understanding of events occurring in the world around them (Goffman 1974). Such frameworks or frames of understanding are critical for the way people interpret the crisis, as they privilege explanations that resonate more closely with their own pre-existing cognitive and ideational constituent elements (Edelman 1993; Chong and Druckman 2007). Greek society has traditionally been characterized by the co-existence of different frames of understanding of Greece’s place in the world, exhibiting a kind of cultural fragmentation shaped by the relative emphasis placed upon different aspects and interpretations of Greek identity.

According to the influential cultural dualism thesis of Diamantouros’ (1994), Greek society is characterized by the struggle between two competing cultures: a so-called ‘underdog’ culture and a reformist culture. The first is said to hail from the dominant indigenous pre-revolutionary norms, institutions and practices, which are the result of an amalgam of Byzantine (including Christian Orthodox) and Ottoman heritages. These fundamentally traditional, pre-­capitalist and pre-modern social features shaped a culture characterized by a defensive, protectionist and xenophobic outlook of Greece’s place in the world, which fostered an aversion to reforms, modernization and the market economy and idolized the state as a provider and protector of the people (Diamantouros 1994, pp. 9–16). The second cultural tradition, the so-called reformist, was inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment and the ensuing political and economic liberal tradition. These principles and their accompanying institutions such as constitutionalism, rule of law and a bureaucratic state apparatus were gradually imported in Greece following its liberation and transition to modern statehood. This cultural tradition is characterized by its devotion to the promotion of democratic politics, the strengthening of the market economy and the empowerment of civil society versus the state; it adopts a more outward-looking and cosmopolitan perspective, embraces innovation and competition and promotes reforms in these directions (Diamantouros 1994, pp. 17–20).

To some extent, the ‘Memorandum/anti-Memorandum’ rift reflects this fundamental cultural divide. Characteristic traits of the underdog culture were mostly found in the anti-Memorandum camp. Individuals, informal groups and initiatives and political parties on this side of the divide often articulated xenophobic, anti-European and anti-globalization discourses and presented a victimized account of Greece’s woes, which were perceived to be the result of decisions imposed by foreign powers with the collaboration of corrupt domestic elites. In this context, Greece’s place in the EU and particularly in the Eurozone was often contested. On the other hand, the camp that agreed or accepted as necessary at least part of the MoUs’ policies, typically articulated a pro-European stance, which did not question Greece’s place in the European integration process. Moreover, it regarded the crisis as an opportunity to promote reforms to address Greece’s many problems, which were perceived to be the main cause of the crisis. Despite these broadly valid observations on some key features of the attitudes and discourses developed in the two camps, the contribution of this typology for understanding the development of attitudes and discourses during the crisis has its limits.

A first limitation is that criticism or even rejection of the Memorandum should not be perceived as implying necessarily an aversion towards a reformist agenda or identification with a reactionary and parochial mode of thinking. The policy conditionality of MoUs adopted in all Eurozone countries that signed a bailout agreement required each country to address its own imbalances through a painful adjustment process, with minimal provisions for supranational mechanisms that could reduce the economic and social costs associated with it. Adjustment included a regime of austerity policies through ambitious front-loaded fiscal consolidation programmes and structural reforms. This policy mix received criticism from many sides, including some of the world’s most renowned economists (e.g. De Grauwe 2015; Krugman 2015; Eichengreen and Wyplosz 2016), who could hardly be called reactionary or reform averse. Particularly for Greece, the International Monetary Fund’s own Independent Evaluation Office acknowledged in its report in 2013 that serious mistakes had been made in the design of the first programme. Similarly, on the crucial aspect of reforms, recent research has shown that, while necessary, these were often badly designed, not taking into account the economy’s structural features or being undermined by the simultaneous implementation of intensive austerity policies (e.g. Terzi 2015; Manasse 2015; Petralias et al. 2018; Katsikas et al. 2018b). On the other hand, acknowledging the design problems of the MoUs does not reduce the responsibility of consecutive governments for the partial, erratic and half-hearted implementation of the programme, particularly in the area of structural reforms (see e.g. Katsikas et al. 2018b).

A second difficulty in explaining the ‘Memorandum/anti-Memorandum’ divide with recourse to the cultural dualism thesis is that it is not easy to establish the identification of individuals and groups belonging to a specific culture with a specific side of the divide. This difficulty is due to the fact that the association of different groups of people exclusively with one of the two cultures is not straightforward to begin with. In the original exposition of the theory, the two cultures are identified with specific groups. Thus, bearers of the underdog culture are likely to be found in the most traditional, introvert and least competitive sectors of the Greek economy (e.g. subsistence farming, import-substitution sectors and the public sector), while people engaged in activities that expose them to the international economic and political system and most importantly the Greek diaspora (especially during the first decades of the Greek state’s existence) are supposed to endorse the reformist culture (Diamantouros 1994, pp. 15–18).

While this categorization seems intuitive and is undoubtedly accurate to some extent, historical experience demonstrates that it is neither complete nor stable through time. In other words, elements of both cultures can be found across different population groups and with different intensity at different times. Indeed, Diamantouros points out that two distinctive features of these cultures are that they are cross-sectional, that is, they tend ‘…to cut across Greek institutions, strata, classes, or political parties…’ and consequently that ‘…both cultures have historically reproduced themselves within the quasi-totality of Greek institutions, structures and social arrangements’ (Diamantouros 1994, p. 9). Thus, popular majorities have often supported modernizing and progressive reforms, while all too often, certain norms and practices related to the traditionalist, underdog culture have been associated with modernizers.

Perhaps the most telling example of the difficulty to identify particular groups with specific values is the pervasive appeal of one of the underdog’s culture principal traits – that of particularism. Particularism refers to the close association and loyalty to various social groups and particularly the family, which often leads to a clash with moral principles (and their institutional embodiments), which serve the welfare of the entire society, such as justice and the rule of law. As Tsoucalas notes, ‘The central role of coexisting reference groups imposing their own normative codes on behavioral reason results in the necessity of achieving a constant balance between incompatible and antagonistic moral pressures’ (1991, p. 15). The difficulty of this balancing act has been evident in the ranks of self-identified modernizers and reformers of the distant but also the more recent past, who have often indulged themselves in particularistic practices such as nepotism and corruption (Xenakis 2013). These examples demonstrate how precarious it is to extrapolate from broad cultural norms economic or political agendas and associate them with specific groups (Triandafyllidou et al. 2013). Moreover, these past experiences undermined the credibility of self-identified reformers before and during the crisis; for many people, the reformist discourse coming from members of political and economic elites who were widely perceived as responsible for many of the country’s woes sounded hollow and insincere. This, in turn, undermined the credibility of the reform discourse itself, often among people who under different circumstances would endorse a significant part of the reformist agenda.

Greece’s European predicament

The ambiguous and incongruous effects of the complex amalgamation of normative ambivalence and material fragmentation of the Greek society are well illustrated in the attitudes of Greeks towards European integration. Before accession, part of Greece’s elites and society viewed Greece’s membership in the European Community (EC) as an opportunity to safeguard and institutionally embed democratic politics in Greece, revitalize the economy and promote progressive reforms in the state and society. In other words, European integration was viewed as a route to modernization, as was also the case in other countries of the European South or later in the former communist regimes (Triandafyllidou et al. 2013). This view, however, was not shared by all political parties, economic actors, or segments of society from the beginning. Indeed, a significant part of the political system and the public resisted the idea of EC membership. This ‘eurosceptic’ stance culminated in 1981, the very year in which Greece became an EC member; the results of that year’s elections gave the two parties that rejected Greece’s EC membership (socialist PASOK, the winner of the elections, and the Greek communist party (KKE) approximately 60% of the vote), while Eurobarometer surveys of that period show that the majority of people either rejected or were ambivalent about the EC (Verney 2011).

Despite an initial difficult period, the attitude of the governing party and its allies gradually warmed to the idea of European integration. The gradual abandonment of PASOK’s anti-European stance over the 1980s depoliticized EC participation and increased public support for EC membership (Mavris 2004). The material benefits of membership,³ the prospect of participating in the world’s largest market and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which signalled the prevalence of liberal economic policies and foretold of European integration’s expansion towards the East, gradually lifted any remaining doubts. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, economic prosperity, the prospect of participation in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and new opportunities presented by the creation of the EU, including, among other things, European legislation, which advanced social and economic rights, the potential for an EU foreign and security policy during a period of increased insecurity in Greece’s neighbourhood and the possibility to travel, study and work freely in other European countries, consolidated pro-European attitudes, making Greek society one of the most pro-European integration societies.

However, the broadening social support for European integration did not ­translate into support for the reforms in public policy, institutions and the economy, which were necessary to ensure that Greece fulfilled the commitments and obligations of EU membership. While reforms have undoubtedly been promoted in many policy areas, particularly as far as organizational structures, procedures and regulatory frameworks are concerned, it seems that underlying norms and therefore actual practice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 The elusive consensus of a society in crisis
• 2 ‘It’s not the austerity, stupid’: interpreting the frames of the far-right wing radicalization
• 3 Greek elites’ attitudes about the crisis
• 4 Framing the sacred: separation panic as the main frame of the European Union during the July 2015 referendum in Greece
• 5 Assessing the image of Germany in the Greek media during the crisis (2010–2015)
• 6 Chancellor Merkel’s visits to Greece and the 2015 referendum: shifting blaming patterns in readers’ online comments
• 7 Framing the crisis in Greece
• Index